


losing a piece of me

by huphilpuffs



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Coming Out, Established Relationship, Internalized Biphobia, Labels, M/M, Mentions of homophobia, Sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 07:16:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13585017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/huphilpuffs/pseuds/huphilpuffs
Summary: Sometimes Dan likes boys more than he likes girls, and gets upset with himself for it.





	losing a piece of me

**Author's Note:**

> This isn’t meant to be a reflection of Dan or Phil’s actual sexuality, but rather an exploration of the complexities of sexuality and people’s relationships with the labels used to identify them. (Also, having a gender preference doesn’t make you not-bisexual, if that’s how you feel comfortable identifying.) Trigger warning for food mentions.

Sometimes Dan likes boys more than he likes girls. 

There’s an appeal to broad chests and shoulders and narrow hips and how they feel pressed against his that has warmth spreading in his chest. A mental image of large hands rough and gripping at him that haunts the recesses of his mind. A phantom brush of stubble over the taunt lines of his neck and short hair threaded between his fingertips and a muscled torso rippling under his greedy hands and he  _ loves  _ it. 

Sharp features and square jaws and prominent brows.

Something distinctly  _ male  _ that makes his insides twist and his pulse stutter and eyes snap open on a gasped breathe of guilt.

Phil sits only a few feet away across the sofa and Dan swallows around the knowledge that he’s spent years with a man, living the fantasies that leach into his thoughts in all their destructive glory. And he blames them on that, on Phil, on the fact that such a significant portion of his life has been occupied by a relationship where he presses kisses to a broad chest and lets his hands grasp at narrow hips. 

He loves a man. That’s why it’s men who infiltrate his mind, he tells himself.

(Because sometimes Dan likes boys more than he likes girls, and gets upset with himself for it.)

\---

When the questions had first swept their disastrous path through his chest it had been in the booming voices of bullies and the nagging reminders of stereotypes.

His hair had been too long over his ears and his interests were too girly for a straight boy. His arms and legs were too lanky and his clothing not quite masculine enough and the eyes that stared back at him in the mirror widened with fear and gleamed with tears.

It was in voices he hated that he heard the maybes and what ifs that lingered at the edges of his consciousness.

It was their leers that forced him aware of the way his gaze lingered too long on the boys in his classes and not quite long enough on the actresses in films.

There was a girl in his life who felt secure. Her presence was warm in his arms and her smile made him happy and it was easy to care for her, safe to be with her. Her long hair and soft eyes made his heart rate rise and it was enough. It was  _ good.  _

There was a boy on his computer screen with hair that flopped over his eyes and a lopsided grin and a voice that rumbled and cracked in Dan’s earbuds. He would watch late into the night, a smile on his face and eyelids drooping, and a quieter voice in his  head asking  _ so what if your gaze lingers too long? _

And there was a word in all his searches that had made sense: bisexual. 

\---

Some days it feels like he blinked and in an instant his childhood bedroom of questions faded into a grown up’s home of answers that seem too uncertain.

He cracks open his eyes to a collection of furniture they’ve accumulated over the years, to evidence of a life shared and lived with such effort, such brilliance. There’s dirty laundry swept under the bed and family photos littering a chest of drawers and suits from award shows hanging in a closet. 

A curl flops over his forehead and he doesn’t resolve to fix it as soon as he crawls out of bed. There’s a bottle of pills on his nightstand meant to help the apathetic and obsessive and broken and sad parts of his brain. And a photograph of him and Phil in Japan sitting on the nightstand opposite him. 

In a little while he’ll slip downstairs and share a morning with the man he loves, press a kiss to a stubbled jaw and listen to the low rumble of a voice he once thought he’d only hear coming from a computer screen. 

Some days it’s easy to exist that way, in his grown up self’s home built on possibilities and love and a foundation of everything they’ve been through.

Everything they still want to share.

\---

There was a night when Dan’s computer screen lit up his bedroom with the brightness of a Skype call that he’d asked: “Do you like boys?”

His breath had been caught and hope simmered beneath his ribs and something warm settled in his stomach when Phil’s head had dipped, fingers finding his fringe as it hid most of his smile.

Phil had said: “Uh, yeah,” and then “I don’t really label it, but I guess I’m bisexual?”

Dan had still had a girlfriend, and his computer was lit up with the face of a boy who took his breath away more than she ever had.

“Me too,” he’d said. “I’m, uh, bisexual too, I think.”

(Phil had known Dan had a girlfriend, but Dan still thinks the way he smiled that night was with the same hope for something more between them that Dan had tried to pretend didn’t linger long after they’d hung up the call.)

\---

Phil still doesn’t really label it.

He goes about his day loving Dan, loving a man, and halfway through a film they’re watching together, will point out that the female protagonist is attractive. It’s easy and casual and when it comes up with trusted friends he still says he’s bisexual.

He’s still the embodiment of how Dan defines bisexuality. 

(Not that his definition is accurate. He knows it’s not. But it still claws its way through his mind with a grating discomfort he can never silence entirely.)

Phil is the type that, playing a game, will comment on the attractiveness of a female character and a male one in the span of minutes. The type whose gaze lingers on girls and guys. Who watches one film because the main actress is beautiful and another because he has a not-at-all-subtle crush on the male protagonist. 

They’re walking out the of the cinema after having seen Wonder Woman when Dan realizes it again.

It takes a few moments, after they’ve gushed over the film to the same tune as everyone else. They’ve tossed their rubbish into the bin and slipped their jackets back on and stepped into the chilled night air. Phil’s head is dipped, eyes wide, fringe a bit wayward over his forehead. 

“Gal Gadot and Chris Pine, in one film? Amazing.”

It’s far from obvious. Dan knows that anyone else would probably think he was talking about the acting. But it’s been eight years of seeing films with Phil, eight years of seeing the little grin he gets when he’s talking about someone he finds attractive. 

The same grin that’s spread across his face now.

Dan smiles back, nods, stares at his feet. “Yeah.”

The thing is, it’s been eight years of seeing films with Phil.

And it doesn’t take eight years to realize that, more often than not, he relates to Phil’s appreciation of men far more than his appreciation of women. 

\---

Phil is also the type of person who has only really dated people of one gender and yet is still comfortable calling himself bisexual.

Dan is the type who goes home that night, curls up on his side in bed, and thinks about how it’s his boyfriend’s arm wrapped around his waist, how he thinks too much about boys for the term to feel right where it settles over his shoulders.

It’s been too long since his head hit the pillow, and he rolls over for the upteenth time since they laid down.

Phil rolls over with him, re-secures the arm that’s lingered around Dan’s middle, presses a kiss to his shoulder and says: “Stop thinking so loud. Gotta sleep.”

Dan closes his eyes, and dreams fitfully of the boys in high school who used to tease him for being too gay.

\---

By the time he wakes up, it feels silly.

Phil’s propped up in bed, pillows adjusted against the headboard, phone in hand. He always stays late after nights when Dan can’t sleep, concern gleaming in his eyes and heavy in the quiet  _ good morning  _ he offers. He drops his phone and runs his fingers through Dan’s hair, leans down for a quick kiss before slipping away with promises to have coffee ready for them both.

Dan’s still wrapped in the duvet when the door closes behind him, head squished in a pillow, the ghost of a kiss tingling on his lips.

It feels silly, he thinks, to have a sexuality crisis when you’re a boy who’s been dating a boy for so many years. But that doesn’t stop the feeling that settled heavy between his ribs.

\---

There was a time around when he dropped out of uni that Dan realized he hated labels.

They were restricting, tight around his bones until his actions operated per something self-imposed and unwanted. He was a boy so his feet dragged him to the men’s section of every store. He was a student so he poured over textbooks until his eyes burned from the tears that had welled. He was a YouTuber so he spent too many nights wallowing in the uncertainty of the only career that had ever felt right.

He’d been drowning in them, the expectations. They’d gripped at his arms and legs and pinned him into a mould of himself that didn’t feel wrong, but never felt quite right. So he shed them, one by one, ignoring the voices in his head that echoed them back at him in favour of the relief freedom breathed into his lungs.

The first time he stepped into the women’s section, he bought nothing, but left smiling.

He picked himself up off the ground and shoved textbooks into his closet as he decided that being a student hurt too much to be right.

And when Phil asked him to come along to host a radio show in London, he said yes despite the apprehension that prickled at his spine. 

He’d left that year feeling better.

(He’d left that year still wearing the label bisexual on his shoulders.)

\---

It’s been years since Dan had found himself staring at a webpage with questions about his sexuality spilling into the search engine.

(That isn’t entirely true. There were a handful of times, mid-existential crisis where he’d been in a frenzy to reevaluate every facet of his identity, reading every definition of bisexual he could find with teary eyes and shaking hands.)

But he’s not in the midst of a crisis now, not crying his way to the Google homepage, not gasping as he types in his query. He doesn’t spill over a trail of definitions of a single sexuality. There’s no itch in his bones making him desperate to make sense of who he is in the endless expanse of the universe.

He’s sitting on their sofa, feet propped up in front of him, drifting away from tumblr for a moment to seek answers to the questions that won’t go away.

_ Sexualities _ , is what he types.

He feels like his teenage self again, biting his lip and using vague searches to find specific definitions for facets of himself he can’t quite make sense of. Like the young boy whose hair was still curly after a shower who first typed  _ am I gay  _ into Google and skimmed advice he wasn’t yet ready to take when the results showed.

The screen of his laptop is alight with a too-long page of too many labels and it feels just as overwhelming now as it did back then. 

He’s been bisexual for years, he tells himself. Why can’t he just stay that way?

But his gaze trips over that definition, skims it once before he actually reads it, internalizes it, breathes with it weighing too heavy on his chest.

(He knows why he can’t stay that way. This feeling, this ache, is why.)

And with a single click, he closes the page, and goes back to the safer, infinite scroll of social media.

\---

“Would you still love me if I was gay?”

He asks it in the darkness of their bedroom, staring at the ceiling where shades of black swirl into patterns that disappear when he blinks. Phil’s head has just hit the pillow, his contented sigh still ringing in the air. Dan feels his shoulders go tense, closes his eyes and reminds himself it’s a reaction a sudden question, not an indication of Phil’s impending response.

Because Dan knows what he’ll say.

It’s been years of this back and forth, of sharing space and confessions and thoughts they hate as much as the ones that fall from their tongues as they giggle. He knows Phil, but sometimes the voices in his head give him unwarranted worries that won’t go away without reassurance only words can offer.

Phil knows Dan enough to know that, too.

He reaches back with one hand, fumbles over the mattress until their fingers are tangled.

“Of course I would,” he says.

(The  _ you know I would _ goes unspoken.)

\---

They don’t talk about it in daylight.

Phil eats his cereal for breakfast, and Dan sticks out his tongue in feigned annoyance because it makes Phil’s eyes crinkle around silent laughter. Dan pours them both their morning coffee, and Phil sets up the TV to watch a morning episode of their most recent show, and neither of them asks questions. 

On another day, in another moment, Dan knows he’ll fret over the details of his sexuality again. 

But in the morning, when curtains are drawn so the outside world paints nothing but thin stripes across their lounge, and the sounds of shared space play, familiar, in his ears, the thoughts fade away.

\---

When he was younger, it took him countless dives into the web to finally accept that he wasn’t entirely straight. There was a day when he’d been watching YouTube and had been away from the toxic masculinity of his secondary school for a while, that he returned to Google with knowledge burning in his stomach and a need to confirm it driving the patterns of his typing. 

He’d been biting his lip and smiling and pouring over people’s descriptions of their not-straightness when he’d whispered into the silence of his bedroom.

“I like boys,” he said.

Then again, “I like boys,” but louder that time.

And with tears in his eyes he’d turned off his computer, figuring that was enough of a step for one day. His heart had been racing, and he’d wanted a moment to just enjoy the sense of security in himself that had been at te very edges of his grasp for so long.

(The next day, he had worried about what to tell his girlfriend, about if he had an actual crush on the various boys that had caught his attention over the years, about what, specifically, he was. But that day, he was comfortable being label-less and decidedly not straight.)

\---

It’s with that same excitement that he opens his laptop today.

His hands are shaking again and he’s trying not to bite his lip and the warm in the pit of his stomach feels impossibly similar to that from years ago. He opens his web browser and goes through his history to find the list of definitions he’d shut down a little while ago. 

He reads them all, even the ones he knows won’t apply. One by one until he reaches the bottom of the page, and then goes back to re-read the ones that felt like they could maybe, possibly, feel right.

By the end of it, he’s staring at a single word, drags his cursor over it and pastes that into Google.

Phil’s sitting at the other end of the sofa on his own computer, probably going through video ideas for the gaming channel like he said he would. And when Dan glances up from his screen, Phil does too, a knowing smile in his eyes.

Dan smiles back, and turns back to his research with the same curious gaze that brought him there.

\---

He tests the word on his tongue when Phil’s filming an AmazingPhil video and Dan is meant to be tidying their bedroom. 

His weight settles onto the bed, and he stares at himself in the white mirror that used to stand in Phil’s room. There’s a pile of shoes on the floor, knick knacks they’ve gathered littered across shelves, a crooked duvet beneath his hands. Sunlight flits through the curtains and gleams in the moon mirror that hangs over the bed and shines in Dan’s eyes as he grins.

“Queer,” he says into the silence.

His voice cracks like when he was a teen, but the worries that had been weighing on his shoulders dissipate. There’s a warmth to the term, a history that makes it feel powerful on his tongue. It’s abstract, frees him of the expectations he’d set for himself, of strict definitions that haunt the back of his mind.

Perfect for a boy who likes girls sometimes, but likes boys a fair bit more. 

“I’m queer,” he says this time, and the smile spreads across his face.

He sinks back onto their unmade bed and stares at the ceiling. Basks in the fact that, while it might be silly to have a sexuality crisis when you’re twenty-five and have long-since accepted that you’re not straight, the security that falls over him is just the same as it was when he was seventeen and speaking the words for the first time. 

\---

That day, Phil knew something was up, because he’d drawn Dan into his arms, pressed a kiss to his shoulder, and held him there for a long moment. There wasn’t a word, just comfort and quiet and smiles and an air of having known each other for so long that nothing else felt necessary.

By the next week, the high has faded a bit, but the discomfort Dan had been fleeing doesn’t come back, and he figures maybe he found the right word this time.

Or maybe it will be right for a while, too, and one day he’ll have to search for the right label for a Dan with older bones and new experiences. 

Either way, he settles into bed with the man he loves and falls asleep without a worry to keep him awake.

\---

“Can you do me a favour?”

Phil looks up at him. Their breakfast is spread out over the counter, their feet pressed to the rungs of barstools, coffee spinning with swirls of milk. “Of course,” comes his response.

“Come out to me again,” says Dan. “Please?”

There’s just a second’s hesitation before Phil says: “I don’t really like to label it, but I guess I’m bisexual.” There’s a smile on his face, and his spoon has fallen back into his cereal bowl.

The expectation is there, but it’s not what has Dan smiling back, ignoring the quiver of his voice as he speak.

“Cool,” he says. “I’m, uh, queer.”

Later, he knows Phil will ask what exactly that means to him. And Dan will explain that he likes the formless blob feeling it gives him. That he appreciates having a name for this abstract liking girls and boys a little more feeling that has followed him for years and shifted into something he couldn’t define the same way he did when he was young.

But for now, Phil just leans over and presses a kiss to Dan’s cheek.

“Okay,” he says. “I love you.”

(The smile that stays spread across Dan’s face that day is a mixture of  _ I love you too  _ and  _ thank you  _ and the easy realization that, for the moment, he’s quite happy with himself.)


End file.
